ABSTRACT
When serious illness or injury strikes, our bodily capabilities, and sense of identity, may be profoundly challenged. Recovery need not involve medical cure, and may take place in the face of ongoing impairment. Using a musical story and structure, and examples of persons coping with cancer, lung disease, heart attack, amputation and stroke, this chapter looks at different “movements” that take place during the process of loss and recovery. Illness/injury can cause a sense of “impossibility”—all the things one can no longer do or be. However, recovery involves “re-possibilizing” one’s world in a variety of ways. One can discover that “I’m-possibility”—that there are embodied ways of accomplishing or adapting one’s goals, and modes of technological and social assistance to be had. In addition, one can explore what I call the “‘I am’ possibility”—that there is a level of being—the “I am”—that carries one beyond bodily limitations. Experiences of transcendence may, but need not, be interpreted religiously—they take many forms, including the intellectual, social and spiritual. As indicated by the verbal word-play, these three dimensions (impossibility, I’m-possibility, the “I am” possibility) are not simply separate stages, but interpenetrating dimensions of experience as one lives with an altered and impaired body.
